Midway through her trial, Barbara Atkinson pleaded guilty to felony injury to a child to spare two of her children from testifying. She received a life sentence and will be eligible for parole in 2031. She is shown here in prison in November 2002. (Kim Ritzenthaler/Staff Photographer)

Sixth of eight parts

By SCOTT FARWELL
Staff Writer
sfarwell@dallasnews.com

A nurse asked Lauren to step on a scale in the emergency room of Children’s Medical Center Dallas but quickly realized the emaciated 8-year-old was too weak to stand.

So she stepped on the scale first, then scooped up the frail girl and subtracted.

Lauren weighed 25.6 pounds.

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“She was hospital sick, and more than sick, you could tell she was in pain"

About the same time, just south of Dallas, Lauren’s mother, Barbara Atkinson, was being booked into the Hutchins city jail.

She weighed 242 pounds.

Over the next 18 months, detectives plumbed the depths of depravity Lauren suffered at the hands of Barbara and Kenneth Atkinson — the prolonged starvation, the savage sexual torture, the unremitting neglect.

The mounting evidence against Lauren’s mother and stepfather formed the basis of the couple’s high-profile criminal trials in 2002.

Hutchins Assistant Police Chief David Landers, who led the investigation, knew Lauren had been starved as he stood in the emergency room the night of her rescue in June 2001. But he could not fathom the suffering she had endured.

“She was hospital sick, and more than sick, you could tell she was in pain,” Landers said. “And she was just so little bitty.”

At one point, Lauren mentioned she was thirsty.

So Landers stepped around the corner and bought her a soda. Lauren perked up when he poured some over ice and handed her the cup.

“I didn’t want to give her anything strong,” Landers said. “So all I could think of was a Mountain Dew.”

In retrospect, he said, it might not have been the best idea to give a starving child a sugary drink. But as a dad and a detective, he’s convinced he did the right thing.

“The doctors told me later it didn’t hurt her,” he said. “I just couldn’t let her sit there thirsty.”

The only thing Lauren remembers from that day is “the Mountain Dew man.”

It was the first kindness she had been shown in years.

"I never wanted her"

The night she was arrested, Barbara Atkinson told police she loved Lauren "with all my heart and soul." Days later, she hardened, telling a CPS investigator, “I never loved Lauren. I never wanted her." (Courtesy Photo)

“I never loved Lauren. I never wanted her”

Within hours of their arrests, the Atkinsons were speaking freely to police.

“Lauren should be able to be out playing and laughing with the whole family,” Barbara Atkinson wrote the night she was taken into custody. “I know the one [I] owe the most love and security to is Lauren. She deserves so much more and I love her with all my heart and soul.”

But days later, in an interview with Child Protective Services investigator Stephanie Boniol, she hardened.

Kenneth Atkinson mostly blamed his wife for the abuse, which he said intensified in 1996 when the family moved into an old home in Waxahachie and his wife fell into depression after a miscarriage.

Atkinson, a carpenter by trade, built a wall of cabinets to partition off a windowless room where 3-year-old Lauren was kept. A hole was cut in the floor and a potty chair placed over it.

Barbara Atkinson said that when the family lived in Waxahachie in the late 1990s, Lauren's stepfather Kenneth would get frustrated with the girl, duct-tape her legs, bind her hands behind her and throw her into this crawl space, called “The Hole.” (Courtesy Photo)

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Filthy conditions and an abundance of food marked the appearance of the trailer in Hutchins where the Atkinsons lived. (Courtesy Photo)

Barbara Atkinson said her husband would get frustrated when Lauren cried or got into things. He’d duct-tape her legs at the calf, bind her hands behind her back and throw her into a crawl space under the kitchen pantry. It was known in the family as “The Hole.”

By the time the Atkinsons and their six children moved to Hutchins a few years later, Lauren was confined to a closet in the master bedroom almost full time.

She languished there for nearly a year on cans of cold soup, crackers, bags of bread and an occasional tub of butter sneaked in by her older sister, Blake.

“Barbie said it started off where she’d just be mad at her for mistakes and accidents, and she would spank her and the spankings got a little harder and the feelings got a little harder,” said Emily Owens, an investigator for the Dallas County district attorney’s office.

“And as things happen, they don’t seem so bad after you do it over and over. Then it gets easier to do, and you do a little bit more, and you do a little bit more, and then we got to where we are now.”

Food for dogs, not Lauren

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When police searched the Atkinsons' filthy, smelly mobile home in Hutchins after Lauren's rescue, they found plenty of food in the refrigerator, freezer and cabinets. (Courtesy Photo)

Over the next several hours, officers from at least three police agencies moved through the home with video and still cameras, looking for evidence.

It smelled like a filthy litter box and looked like a homeless camp: piles of dishes with rotting food, mounds of moldy clothes, toys and stuffed animals strewn everywhere.

The detectives took note of cabinets packed with graham crackers, macaroni and cheese, bags of bread and tubs of coffee.

The refrigerator was stocked with bottles of Coors Light and a few cartons of eggs. In the freezer, a chicken and a ham sat on a shelf next to two packages of microwaveable enchiladas.

“There was a lot of food in the refrigerator and fast-food boxes everywhere, so people were eating and Barbara sure wasn’t missing many meals,” Owens said.

“But what got me was there was food down for the dogs, and dog vitamins. They were treating the dogs better than Lauren.”

Hutchins police carried evidence out of the trailer, including the feces- and urine-covered carpet in the closet where Lauren's parents made her stay. (Vernon Bryant/Staff Photographer)

The officers discovered a box of sex toys, but no direct evidence of sexual abuse or drugs. They seized a wooden paddle and a book, 101 Activities for Kids in Tight Spaces.

Eventually, officers made their way to the master bedroom closet.

“I remember two things about that closet: the smell and the first step,” said Lesher, who is now retired. “It was carpeted and urine just squished up around my shoes. There wasn’t a dry place I could find that wasn’t soaked with body fluids, and there was feces smeared everywhere.”

Lesher was called in to supervise the collection of evidence because he’d worked some of the city’s most vile crime scenes.

“I’d been in trailers worse than that in my career, but I’d never been in a cage like that before,” he said. “And that’s what it was. It was a cage, not a closet.”

Lesher made two critical decisions that night.

One, he instructed deputies to collect the closet door as evidence — there were scratch marks on the door handle, possibly from Lauren biting and clawing to escape. And two, he asked them to roll up the foul carpet and bag it for use during trial.

“Nobody was thrilled about that, but everybody understood it was a necessary evil,” Lesher said. “The jury needed a vision of what this girl was subjected to.”

‘The stronger case’

During her closing statement in Barbie Atkinson's trial, prosecutor Patricia Hogue said of Lauren, "I want you to put yourself in the dark, the light switch too high for you to reach. And just think about her, day after day after day in the dark as she listened while her brothers and sisters played out in the trailer house and rode their bikes and played outside in the sunshine and walked on the grass." (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

Patricia Hogue, who was head of the district attorney’s child-abuse division, has been described by detectives as “meaner than three snakes dipped in kerosene.”

It was meant as a compliment.

“It was a big case, and there was a lot of media attention,” said Hogue, now an attorney for a nonprofit focused on child-abuse issues.

“Obviously, I was aware of that and that’s why I was handling the case. I didn’t want this one coming back on appeal, because she [Lauren] just couldn’t handle that.”

While there was never any real doubt about Barbara and Kenneth Atkinson’s guilt — based on the damage done to Lauren’s body and their confessions — they were never tried for sexual assault.

Both denied raping Lauren.

Kenneth Atkinson was charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child, but those charges were dropped when prosecutors learned Lauren could not testify.

She acted out some of the abuse during play therapy, where she said the “bad dad hurt me” and demonstrated by poking a hand and thumb into the vagina of an anatomically correct doll, according to court documents.

She then hit the doll over and over between the legs, moaned in pain, screamed and growled.

The jury in Kenneth Atkinson's 2002 trial saw images of Lauren in the hospital the night of her rescue, when the 8-year-old weighed only 25.6 pounds. (File Photo)

But Lauren would not verbalize what happened to her. When asked, she would shut down, narrow her eyes and stare into space.

Psychologists said it could take years of therapy before she would feel safe enough to put the abuse into words.

“Lauren was so developmentally traumatized and emotionally traumatized, she really wasn’t in any condition to talk about the sexual abuse,” Hogue said. “We went with the stronger case, and the one that wouldn’t require her to testify.”

In his closing argument, defense attorney Brad Lollar described his client as both a victim and a victimizer.

Born to a drug addict and a schizophrenic 13-year-old mother, Barbara Atkinson bounced from one flop house to another until she was adopted by Doris and David Calhoun at age 4.

Testimony suggested she was physically and sexually abused as a toddler.

“You can only suspect what type of abuse was visited on Barbara at the hands of a known child molester and child abuser,” Lollar said. “For the first three years of her life, she’d been shoved around from place to place, neglected to the max, abused.”

A psychologist testified that Barbara Atkinson suffered from a borderline personality disorder that contributed to a warped reality in which Lauren became a scapegoat for the family’s problems.

In her final statement, Hogue invited the jury into Lauren’s closet.

“I want you to put yourself in the dark, the light switch too high for you to reach,” she said. “And just think about her, day after day after day in the dark as she listened while her brothers and sisters played out in the trailer house and rode their bikes and played outside in the sunshine and walked on the grass.

“Think about how Lauren felt.”

The jury stayed out almost five hours before reaching a verdict of life in prison. The deliberation took awhile, jurors said, because some panelists were worried that Atkinson would be eligible for parole too soon.

Almost a year later, another jury convicted Kenneth Atkinson of the same crime and sentenced him to life. They’re both eligible for parole in 2031, the year Lauren will turn 38.

(Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

Owens asked to interview Barbara Atkinson after her sentencing.

They sat down in a small room in the bowels of the Lew Sterrett Justice Center.

Slowly, over the next two hours, Owens said, her view of Barbara Atkinson grew in complexity — yes, she was a monster who had committed an unspeakable crime, but she also was wounded and vulnerable and afraid of her future.

Atkinson said she never saw Lauren as emaciated and sick until photographs flashed on a screen during the trial.

Owens’ mind raced, looking for a way out. She knew where this was going.

Barbara (top) and Kenneth Atkinson confer with their lawyers at their trials. Both received life sentences for their abuse of Lauren. (Michael Ainsworth/Staff Photographer)

“I hear you’re a Christian woman,” Atkinson said. “Will you do me a favor before you leave? Will you pray me out of this place?”

Owens understood what she meant — not pray for her escape from prison, but pray for a release from her sins.

She reached across the table.

“Taking that girl’s hands and praying with her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Owens said. “I just wanted to pray, ‘God, kill her.’ But I don’t think it was her chains that were released that day, they were mine.